The original version of MouseText in the Apple IIc included a depiction of a figure running, perhaps to portray the action of running a program. This icon was later found to be unnecessary, and Tognazzini sent a letter to Call-A.P.P.L.E. magazine warning developers not to use them, as they would be replaced.1
The MouseText characters replaced a redundant set of inverse uppercase characters (@,A..Z,[,\,],^,_) in the Alternate character set.
There are two main ways to put MouseText characters on the screen.
For example, in Applesoft BASIC the following code fragment will display the MouseText representation of a folder:
Version 13.0 of the Unicode Standard, released March 2020, includes all of the MouseText characters except the two Apple logos, mostly in the Symbols for Legacy Computing block.23
"8-The Apple IIc". 23 June 2010. http://apple2history.org/history/ah08/ ↩
"Symbols for Legacy Computing" (PDF). The Unicode Standard, Version 13.0. The Unicode Consortium. March 2020. ISBN 978-1-936213-26-9. 978-1-936213-26-9 ↩
Ewell, Doug; Bettencourt, Rebecca; Bánffy, Ricardo; Everson, Michael; Marín Silva, Eduardo; Mårtenson, Elias; Shoulson, Mark; Steele, Shawn; Turner, Rebecca (2019-01-04). "Proposal to add characters from legacy computers and teletext to the UCS" (PDF). The Unicode Consortium. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025-terminals-prop.pdf ↩
Ewell, Doug; Bettencourt, Rebecca; Bánffy, Ricardo; Everson, Michael; Marín Silva, Eduardo; Mårtenson, Elias; Shoulson, Mark; Steele, Shawn; Turner, Rebecca. "LegacyComputingSources" (PDF). Proposal to add characters from legacy computers and teletext to the UCS. The Unicode Consortium. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025-aux-LegacyComputingSources.pdf ↩
Bettencourt, Rebecca G. "Apple II MouseText to Unicode Mapping". Kreative Korp. Retrieved 2019-01-04. https://www.kreativekorp.com/charset/map/mousetext/ ↩
The Apple logo. Not included in Unicode.[4] ↩